Yet this does not necessarily signify that Scrooge has assumed control of Christmas 2012. It may be that another of Dickens’s characters will be setting the tone this year. The Spirit of Christmas Present makes the pronouncement that “We Spirits of Christmas do not live only one day of our year. We live the whole three hundred and sixty-five.” There are signs that 2012 present-givers are looking for more practical gifts that keep on giving throughout the year, things that people want and need rather than fripperies. According to one analyst, SDL, 54 per cent of Christmas present spending this year will have been done online. Much of this will have been the electrical goods and textiles that people with no money worries would, in less stringent times, have bought for themselves. That may explain why the John Lewis Partnership, for whom “sensible” might be the appropriate adjective to run alongside its “never knowingly undersold” slogan, is expecting a bumper Christmas.

There will still be plenty who remain untouched by the economic crisis of the past few years, who will restrict their Christmas shopping to the luxe quartiers of Bond Street and Knightsbridge, and perhaps Paris and New York, and who barely glance at the price tags. For most Britons, though, the past few years have impacted their thinking on financial matters. Since May, household disposable incomes have been gradually increasing but only after 19 months of consecutive falls. With food and energy costs still rising, most households continue to feel that they have less cash to splash around than a couple of years ago.

Nevertheless, many will be feeling much more optimistic than they did. The number of workless households in the country has gone down by 244,000 since May 2010. Youth unemployment continues to fall, down by 72,000 in the last quarter. Critics will say that some of these jobs are part-time and so should be regarded as inferior employment. The statistics make it hard to tell the hours involved but the fact is that having a job is, in so many ways, better than having no job, and many people choose to work part-time in order to cope with various other commitments. More people in work is truly good news.

But it is to be hoped that those who are newly employed will take the words of another Dickens character to heart and remember Mr Micawber’s sage advice in David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and sixpence, result misery.”

We are living through the results of a disastrous debt binge, both public and private. The last government borrowed on an unprecedented scale. By 2008, it had become the most indebted of all the rich nations in the world, leaving even the United States looking relatively restrained. And what was good enough for government was easily taken up by individuals. Targeted by a lending industry anxious to persuade customers that they could “take the waiting out of wanting”, as Lloyds’ Access used to trill in its subversive message, people loaded up with debt.

In July 2004, UK personal debt broke through the £1 trillion level for the first time. By then, though, the country really had got an appetite for living on borrowed money and by March 2010, the level was up to £1.46 trillion, outstripping the entire country’s earnings. At that level, accountant PriceWaterhouseCoopers calculated that the average household would need to spend around 15 per cent of its net income simply to service its debts.

Since the 2010 general election and the dawn of the Age of Austerity, households have been very gradually paying off their debts or, as the economists have it, deleveraging. Given that incomes are in any case under strain, hit by the combined effect of pay freezes and price increases, this is a slow and painful process. It means that all expenditure comes under more careful scrutiny, a fact that mainstream shops have had to respond to, with more emphasis on value.

While Greed is Good might have been the creed of the Eighties, a more grown-up mood of financial responsibility seems to be taking route in modern Britain. It doesn’t mean an end to fun, nor to socialising. In times of financial insecurity, friends and family assume more importance and I suspect that for every box of crackers unbought, a round of festive drinks may be purchased. Despite the economic straitjacket, 2012 has been remarkable for Britain, and for London in particular, and the partying of the summer, of the Jubilee, the Olympics and the Paralympics, is being repeated in the last weeks of this extraordinary year.

Corporate parties, though, have definitely been cut back. Companies that are keeping salaries in check realise that lavish festive celebrations would not be appropriate. If they haven’t been paying very much in tax, then even more reason to keep a low profile. Ensuring that those companies make more of a contribution to the nation’s coffers will be part of the Government’s agenda for 2013.

That agenda has been evolving from the issue of deficit reduction, the essential quest since 2010, so that 2013 may have a more upbeat theme of growth. The changes at the Bank of England paved the way for that even before the appointment of an interesting outsider, Canada’s Mark Carney, to head the institution. He has suggested that central banks might try to run economies with a view to overall growth, without losing sight of the need to keep inflation under control. He will have more tools at his disposal than his predecessor ever did. But he will also have a population with a much-reduced appetite for debt. A cost-conscious Christmas will be evidence of that.